hangover
by Regen
Summary: after a night out drinking our protagonist wakes up in a strange forest...


**Waking up in a strange place… **

**(dedicated to the authors of those "Whoops, woke up in Naruto-land!"-stories, some of which are actually a guilty pleasure of mine. Still - most annoy the hell out of me in their simplicity.)**

She woke up after a long night, which had been spent on a pub crawl through the town. As expected, her eyes were gritty, her throat sore, her mouth tasted mightily unpleasant and her head _hurt. _As was her usual procedure after such a night, she tried to remember if the night's experience had been worth the morning's discomfort. Memory flashes showed her moments of giggly joy and crazy dancing, before her head-shaking chuckles at the remembered events abruptly died with a curse at her motion-sick head. She decided to remain motionless for a while longer and fell asleep again.

The next time she woke up, her eyes were no less gritty, her throat no less sore and the taste in her mouth almost gag-worthy. Her head on the other hand had calmed down enough for her to sit up slowly and rub at her eyes, yawning widely. She was surprised to find herself in a forest, lying between enormously huge roots of the tallest tree she had ever seen. No other drunks or even a road in sight. The only thing that really caught her attention at the moment was the very loud complaining of her overly full bladder. But where to relieve that?

She didn't quite trust the seeming isolation. Her friends had quite often tried to trick her into believing she was alone, just so they could catch her doing something stupid like licking at snow or singing arias under the shower. Therefore she decided to look for a place where she could be sure no-one would catch her doing her business in the open.

To her impatient bladder it seemed to be an eternity before she finally found a patch of bushes that actually allowed her to be hidden from view all around, with only a small opening on one side that allowed her to enter her chosen "bush toilet". She felt lucky, too, as the bushes were actually not thorny, unlike most other plants around her. She took the time to smell at the tiny blue blossoms that adorned the twigs and to stroke over a few soft green leaves, before her screaming bladder finally demanded her whole attention.

She popped open the button of her jeans and was just lowering the zipper, when something _whooshed_ through the air just over her head and landed in a tree trunk eight feet away from her, slightly to the right. She froze. In the moments it took her to recognize the stuck object as being silver and star-shaped, it had already been joined by a following of other flying objects that pierced the trunk in an irregular upwards pattern. Motionless, she followed the pattern with her eyes, finding a stationary blob of colour at the end of the line. She blinked, rubbed her eyes, blinked again. Ah. Now she could see clearly again. The blob was actually… a person? Standing vertically on the tree trunk? Now wait just a moment! That reminded her of… She turned her head to see where the silver objects had come from. There was another person standing in one of the trees, though this one was actually standing upright on a thick branch. That was…

Her hung-over brain was slow to come up with the whole crazy idea. The two people were wearing strange clothing. They were throwing silver, _metal_ objects at one another at incredible speed and jumping from tree to tree. But the things that stood out most in her mind were the headbands both persons were wearing. They were plain pieces of cloth in a dark colour, adorned with a metal plate in the front. The metal piece itself had a sign engraved into it.

Her mouth worked noiselessly. Headbands with stylized symbols on them. People throwing weapons at one another. Jumping around on trees, _standing _on (upright) tree trunks… She was in Naruto-land! What was it called again? Ah, yes! Fire Country. Konoha. Hidden in the leaves. That's why there were these enormous trees! And the people up there were not just madmen but probably ninja. Shinobi. And, hey, didn't she even know the names of those crazy guys up there? Wow! That was… that… that was… and that meant… she was fulfilling every fan's dream by somehow miraculously waking up in this fictional world! Uncontrollably, her mouth opened wide in a gasp.

The gasp had barely left her mouth, when her brain was forced to shut down for the final time. A reflexively thrown kunai had successfully severed her brainstem.

Unfortunately the kunai and this world had not been purely fictional after all.

_-but-_

Thankfully, she never found out that her body and clothes had shortly been sullied with urine as her muscles relaxed in death. She also never found out just which animals found her first or how long it actually took her body to properly decompose.

Sadly, she also never found out that her body (or rather a seed still in her digestive tract, deposited there sometime during the previous night, when she had actually taken a break from drinking to eat something healthy _and_ delicious for once) served to introduce pear trees to this strange country and brought a whole new fruit onto the market of Fire Country, boosting economy. Had she been aware, she would probably have liked that, and she would have really liked the taste of the wonderful pear-sake that some retired shinobi genius invented some fifty years after her death. It was delicious.


End file.
